Mobile apps used to be considered just an optional addition to a company’s marketing strategy, but that’s not the case anymore. Given the fact that today mobile apps are one of the main ways to build brand awareness and increase sales, they have become a necessity when it comes to developing a business. And that’s not all! These apps have become part of our daily lives and we don’t even realize anymore that we use them for almost everything that we do. With that being said, we can only expect these apps to become even more present in our lives. So here are five mobile app development trends for 2018:

VR and AR Apps

There’s no doubt that both VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality) have really taken the industry by storm last year and will definitely continue to do so in 2018. According to Dot Com Infoway, the total number of mobile apps with built-in AR capabilities will cross 1580 million in 2018. Maybe the main reason why these technologies have really taken over is because of how important customer experience has become in recent years. AR will really make a difference when it comes to industries such as: healthcare, real estate, engineering, while VR will be more present in the gaming industry and in technology-based companies.

Custom Mobile Apps

According to Gartner, since 2016, more and more companies have started to use custom mobile app development services, in order to help them grow their business and increase their sales. These companies don’t create such apps only for interacting with the customers, but also for interacting within the business. That means there are custom made apps out there meant to serve for organizational purposes, such as tracking employee vacation time or approvals and enrollments.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is currently a big influencer in all technology-related industries, and the mobile app industry is no exception. Huge industries such as education, smart health, automotive or smart homes have been impacted by IoT and mobile apps have already jumped on the bandwagon too. Just to give you a hint of how influential IoT is, the number of connected devices is expected to rise to 23.14 billion in 2018.

Artificial Intelligence

This relatively new technology is considered to be the future of mobile apps, with more and more companies investing in researching and developing this field. Technologies such as natural language processing, knowledge representation or vision and speech recognition are currently being used in numerous mobile apps. But what the future holds is even greater than that, with AI branches such as Neural Networks or Deep Machine Learning being heavily researched right now. Considering the importance of customer-friendly applications lately, more and more businesses want to use AI algorithms for their apps, in order to make them think, reason, listen and talk like humans.

Wearable Devices

This area is always a big challenge for developers and designers. Developing apps for wearable devices such as smart glasses or smart watches is definitely different from developing apps for smartphones and tablets. But in spite of that, wearable technology is becoming one of the fastest growing markets in the field of app development. If we’re talking about the future of wearable devices, we’re not necessarily talking about smart glasses and smart watches, because it’s been a while since those came out. These devices will impact tourism, fashion, finance and the automotive industry and they will definitely impact our lives and change the way we do normal daily stuff.

There is no doubt that the mobile app development industry has come a long way since 2008, when the first mobile app was introduced to the world. Due to smartphones, the growing IoT market or the excessive usage of social media, the app development area is one of the fastest growing markets out there right now. And there’s no sign of stopping anytime soon! The growth of this market is constantly rising, given the fact that people’s hunger for trying new mobile apps that are meant to make their lives much easier, is a never-ending story.

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Chris is an all-around computer geek who had the privilege to watch technology rise from its bare beginnings to power life as we know it today. He's worked as a Software Architect and Developer for several well-known brands and considers himself a digital freedoms advocate and FreeBSD fan.